Now I know what to do with my excess books. Money is good, too.
Author: Bryant
Let’s turn it around. Let’s say a 78 year old lawyer shot Dick Cheney in the face while hunting.
Think it would have taken an entire day before the news was released?
Think the lawyer would have had at least made a statement within a couple days of the incident?
Think the lawyer would be able to skip being interviewed by the police until the morning after the incident?
It’s kind of an unfair comparison; you have to be a little more careful when someone shoots an elected official. Still and all, it’s not as if Vice Presidents shoot people that often. You can probably treat such incidents as serious — rather than “sure, we’ll come back tomorrow and talk about it” — without placing an undue burden on the institution of the Vice President.
I currently have 13 entries for the Oscar picks, as follows: Kirby, Chris T., dancingshaman, telepresence, michele_blue, doogs19, Chad U., kodi, Wyatt, Cass, Brant, Kit, and twillitts. I’m dead serious about the sponsorship thing. I’m gonna throw up a banner for the winner.
There is very little love for one movie as Best Picture, but I won’t tell you which one. Poor thing. I’ll post a summary of entries after the event itself, though.
I got nothing to say about the Oscars this year except for extended bitterness regarding David Cronenberg. That’s OK! kniedzw found an Oscar pool widget, and I thought that was cool, so I set up one of my own.
Go here, make your predictions, and wait. The winner will get to be the sponsor of this blog for a week. I hear that’s a big thing.
Sadly, until this Audacity bug is fixed, I’m gonna have trouble getting the Doc Savage podcast underway. At least it’s a known issue.
So, steampunk. It’s a loose, poorly fitting excuse for a genre. The Wikipedia entry reveals that pretty definitely. You got your computer parables, you got your obsession with steam, you got your fantasy tropes. You do not got decades of cheap adventure novels defining the genre. We make do with what we have, thusly.
Let us assume that the class warfare aspect of steampunk does not appeal to our prospective player as a primary focus of the campaign. I’m keeping the steam-powered automata-driven London, cause come on, how cool is that? The task at hand becomes finding a premise that makes good use of the setting. Doing Scotland Yard operatives is easy but then the setting is just background, rather than integral.
I have never been adverse to layering a touch of the horrific into my settings.
Let’s say that the gears of the difference engines, when layered as closely together as they must be in order to achieve the necessary efficiencies, attract visitors. Angelic and demonic alike? That’s sort of cool. Actually, that’s really cool, since nothing says angels are going to approve of the Queen.
I’m almost lifting from Dark Inheritance here, but it’s a cool setting. I can pull the Brotherhood of the Iron Rose, the Eight Heavenly Dragons, the International Geographic Society, and the Promethean Order wholesale, so I will. Drop the godgenes, drop the titans.
I believe that this consequence is not widely known. In fact, the Engines are only just now getting big enough. Characters should be people who have some sort of relation to the Engines — whether people who live nearby, mechanists, members of the House of Engineers? (Our third legislative body, occupying an uncomfortable slot between the House of Lords and the House of Commons.)
Huh. Sure. Angels/demons manifest as mechanicals, a la the Turk. But with … well, I’ll save that.
Doodle, doodle.
Rep. Boehner was elected House majority leader. This is kind of the most amusing outcome; it’s both a validation of the assertion that the Republican members of the House were too corrupt and a demonstration that the right-wing blogs aren’t much more effective than the left-wing blogs when it comes to Capitol Hill.
Intriguingly, Shadegg dropped out after the first ballot, throwing his support to Boehner. Thanks for campaigning for him, bloggers: looks like he was basically playing kingmaker rather than really running. You could view that as a win in that he’ll have a chunk of influence, I suppose.
Boehner is the guy who handed out campaign checks from the tobacco industry on the House floor in 1995. I’m sure he’s gotten a lot more serious about reform since then, of course. He’s only got… 14 former staffers working as lobbyists, which is almost three times as many as both Blunt and Shadegg combined.
Bush said we shouldn’t make man/animal hybrids; like a lot of people, I was wondering what he meant. I was pretty sure there was some kind of scientific research going on that involved gene therapy, possibly stem cells. It smelled like something prompted by the religious right.
Is there anything you would like to tell us about the Academy Award nominations this year?
“It’s not the first time a Cronenberg movie has gotten a nomination.”
Really? Wait — Spider didn’t get nominated. Was it M. Butterfly?
“No. Movies about gender issues are in the spotlight this year; M. Butterfly was 1993.”
That’s kind of unfair. Hillary Swank’s Oscar for Boys Don’t Cry was in 1999.
“OK, yeah, I’m just being catty. Anyhow, it wasn’t any of those Cronenberg flicks. Nor was it Naked Lunch.”
It wasn’t Crash. I don’t even have to check to be sure of that.
“Nope. Want a hint?”
Sure.
“Not only was a Cronenberg movie nominated for an Oscar, but it won.”
Really?
“Yep. The Fly won for Best Makeup.”
… well, that’s not very prestigious.
“Maybe if he’d accepted the director’s chair on Return of the Jedi, he’d be better off.”
The liberal blog community just had the limits of its power defined. I expect the argument about whether the Alito cloture vote represents an improvement over the Scalia vote or an embarrassment will continue for some time. Either way, a lot of it was about the 2006 and 2008 elections.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of the aisle, the conservative blog community has decided to set up their own power-defining moment. The Republican members of the House vote for their floor leader on Thursday; it’s a three way race between Roy Blunt, John Boehner, and John Shadegg. Shadegg is the reformer. RedState wants Shadegg, Glenn Reynolds is making non-endorsement endorsements, and so on.
It’s an interesting narrative, since endorsing Shadegg is a tacit admission that DeLay was corrupt and that he represented a corrupt culture. It’s going to be more interesting to see if Shadegg wins. I really don’t have any predictions; I don’t have any sense of how influential the conservative blogs are. (Or vice versa; RedState is run by professional Republican political operatives, and cannot be honestly characterized as a grassroots blog.)